Most of the African-American figures in Cedric Smith’s paintings at Gallery Guichard are depicted as if in product packaging or ads: Smith remembers his uncles talking about caddying for whites and using their earnings to buy Cokes, so Coca Cola shows a black boy standing by a golf bag. The weathered-looking red background is inspired by the decrepit signs in his grandmother’s ruined general store, where he played as a child. Smith cut the boy’s image out of an old photo, then collaged it into the work and painted over most of it. In Coop’s Ice Cream the typeface is copied from an ice cream container, but the white boy and girl in the original are replaced by a photo of a black girl. Smith thought she looked forceful, determined, and centered. All the paintings are intensely colored, and there’s a romantic nostalgia to their tactile surfaces.
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Smith sometimes likes to have fun with his subjects. One day he was in an upscale cigar shop and heard other men talking about how a woman shouldn’t tell a man what to do. “The first thing I thought of,” he says, “was ‘real men smoke cigars’”–the words he painted on Real Men, which shows a well-dressed man smoking. “I was just being funny,” says Smith. “You’re all ‘real men’ talking about your wives when they’re not around.”
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